Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Game Night...Chat

Last night was game night, but we didn't play. Two of the four in our group had real life obligations. We've gamed with two of us tromping around, but considering where we are in the megadungeon, meaning, we have to clue where we are, we decided it might be too dangerous with half the party. So instead we talked about gaming for our session last night. Sometimes I even like doing that more than playing.

Some of the topics we covered is what adventures didn't work. +Ken Harrison ran a canned module, I won't mention which one, but it was awful. Ken had thought he could save a little time and run an series of these adventures. We never got past the first one. As a player one of the first things I noticed is the adventure had a very narrow scope of choices. Railroad, but it wasn't even interesting. Our party started out unconscious and when we awoke the first thing we wanted to do was track down who thumped us. That wasn't an option. The premise was to go into the nearby village and do the tasks they asked of us and discover the secrets along the way. The problem was the tasks they asked us to do were not interesting. I went along with it, but even as we reached the climax of the first adventure in this series even the map was boring. Poor Ken couldn't even hide his distaste for the adventure. While the adventure was not at all interesting it did teach me a few lessons on how not to design an adventure.

We discussed all the things that work in Ken's current megadungeon campaign, Montporte. I've written about it a few times, but Ken continues to add layers onto it which keeps me and my character seeking the answers to the mysteries. And the great thing we discussed is Ken will be able to carry over much of what he's developed into other campaigns.

+Rob Conley he is working on a different system to implement for his Majestic Wilderlands. A Fudge version. I've never had the chance to play and look forward to how it works. Rob always does an good job on his projects. He's splitting his time between a couple of projects and currently this one is on the back burner.

I shared the campaign I was working on. I showed them a map of one of the hexes. I have drawn the region map, but haven't had time to scan and detail it. This map will change once I get around to detailing it more. The players will start in the village on the edge of the lake, Baludor.

Each of the smaller hexes is 1 mile, making the larger hex 14 miles.

One of the main topics Ken and I discussed was developing a consistent group of gods. Not necessarily a pantheon because this world has many gods from many cultures. For example the one thing I've established it there are seven gods of death. While not all gods will not have an aspect they influence, but good many will super powerful beings. I'm still not sure how it will work out. Usually I just start writing about one thing and eventually some idea will spring from my pen and I'll run with it. I've got a few adventures I'm working on the first few sessions and I've gotten some very interesting images from the web to help me realize some of the locations and monsters.

So while no game occurred on game night we had a good time talking about what we were working on. How things in gaming worked or didn't work for us. Next week we head back to Montporte. The Steelers are playing Monday night. I have conflicts.